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USDA announces plans to support innovative American-made fertilizer

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123 pointsNoRagrets183 comments

While I doubt this war will trigger the end of globalization, perhaps it will end blind globalization. I can imagine a lot of countries are now asking which critical resources come from so few countries/places that a trade blockage from just one could cripple them.

Fertilizer is a good example. Oil for heating homes in winter, or energy generally. Food is an obvious one. I bet there are a lot more.

I don't think complete protectionism is the answer either, but I suspect there is a safer place between the two extremes that many countries will start to move towards.

Safer for whom? A part of the security logic of neoliberal globalization, whatever it’s other flaws, is to force strategic interdependence between states specifically to make conflict an absolute last resort. Like I want Chinese dependence on foreign markets and I want EU dependence on Russian oil, because as soon as that economic codependency dries up, military intervention is now feasible as a response to crisis. The reason we’re not in a world war right now is because Europe must tread carefully and so must anyone who might align themselves with Russia for reasons that have nothing to do with the possibility of military force, which we all know is subject to uncertainty and an attractive prospect for leaders who like to gamble.

Interdependent trade was theorized to promote peace, but it was only ever a theory, and one that’s becoming increasingly outdated with each passing day that Russia remains in Ukraine. Certainly there are aspects of the concept that are true, but Germany’s dependence on Russian gas is now limiting its ability to respond to a crisis. They’ve handicapped themselves and can no longer promote peace and in fact are funding a war.

>it was only ever a theory, and one that’s becoming increasingly outdated with each passing day that Russia remains in Ukraine.

This seems like a bit of a silly point, given that the war in Ukraine is, at least so far, nothing compared to the conflicts of the past. Do we wanna rush head first back into something that reliably produced worse conflicts than we see today simply because what we have going now isn't perfect?

>Germany’s dependence on Russian gas is now limiting its ability to respond to a crisis. They’ve handicapped themselves and can no longer promote peace and in fact are funding a war.

A bunch of western companies are pulling out of Russia over this and it looks like the whole thing is going worse for the aggressors here than they expected. I'll take this over Germany and Russia engaging directly in armed conflict.

That's the wrong take, and here's why. Interdependent trade doesn't promote peace as much as it discourages outright war. Russia is beating on Ukraine, but it has crossed a field of knives to do it, and will bleed out very soon. Russia will be the example that everyone will point to when their leader starts rattling their sabers.

You're assuming that Russia is all but defeated, but that's an assumption that may not hold. China has recently agreed to provide military assistance to Russia, likely drawing out the conflict further. Rather than prevent war, we may have given our adversaries the economic means to wage a way more intense war than would have been possible otherwise. Surely, Russia wouldn't have as much support had we not bankrolled Russia and its allies for decades. America's trade policies have greatly enriched hostile nations. America has enjoyed global hegemony for a long time, but other countries are sick of picking up the scraps. They want America's seat at the table.

In many ways, the theory that interconnected trade promotes peace is similar to the neo-liberal economic view that globalization promotes lower prices and thus more efficient economies. Such a view has been shown to be an over-simplification and ignores important side-effects of changing trade balances, such as rising economic inequality and the rise of populism.

Yeah I had a similar discussion with a friend. If China was serious about trade and the international "balance" they wouldn't be sending money and arms to Russia, which looks like they probably already agreed to

The same thing was assumed right before the first world war. Back then we also had globalization. It didn’t prevent the war and globalization didn’t return until after the second world war.

> force strategic interdependence between states specifically to make conflict an absolute last resort.

The problem with that logic is that it only kinda works for large, powerful, rich countries as they are the only ones with any leverage. This is also highlighted by your own comment when you refer to China, EU, Russia, and we can add US and a few other countries to the mix.

Everyone else is screwed, as shown by the Ukraine invasion, China's constant sea-land grab in the South China Sea, China trying to land grab against India and Bhutan, and so on. So, regardless of how we may want the above to work, the old rules still apply.

In fact I'll say it's made it worse, since now US and China are dependent on each other to not engage in a direct war, but that means China is now free to screw around everyone else without worrying about US interference.

In case of Russia and EU's dependence on its oil, Russia tried to call the bluff and failed, but the EU is still not interfering and Russia oil was sanctioned just recently. So, it turned out bad for Ukraine.

The security logic was just as you say, but it never seemed very compatible with the facts of history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars), as there have been plenty of wars started _because_ of global trade. But regardless, current events ought to put the final nail in the coffin of this wishful-thinking (but commonly held) piece of logic. Regardless of whether or not it _should_ make countries less likely to go to war, it doesn't in fact actually seem to.

Safer for whom?

Not Ukraine. If trade interdependence keeps democracies from defending other democracies, but doesn’t deter Russia, then it is counterproductive.

There is probably value in interdependence, but it can’t be blind interdependence - it needs to be conditional and truly multilateral. If EU depends more on Russian fossil fuels than Russia depends on EU imports, it isn’t really interdependence.

Trade is not what's keeping Europe from joining the fight with Ukraine. It's nuclear weapons. If the Russians didn't have nukes, they would have already been forcibly expelled from Ukraine, and we'd be debating about whether to push them out of Crimea.

If Russia didn't have nukes the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 wouldn't have been allowed to stand and we wouldn't be talking about another one in 2022.

To save you some typing,

>The reason we’re not in a world war right now is

Nukes.

I like this idea in theory, but in practice I'm not sure if it does much to prevent major conflict.

If I recall correctly, the "interconnectedness" of Europe of the Early 1900s was thought to be the reason that a large war was not possible.

Perhaps increased trade will help nations to settle smaller disputes via diplomacy but the outbreak of war seems to be something can defy rational explanation. That is, we can't always expect that the leaders and citizens of aggressor countries are making rational decisions.

I think nuclear escalation is the thing keeping russia and china from starting an all-out war. Russia has been employed to try to incrementally conquer territory that China wants more control of, the challenge is to try to avoid nuclear war while doing so. I dont understand why china doesn't just buy what it wants, but maybe the cost basis has become important to keep their industry going.

With Russia invading Ukraine it shows that EU's dependence on Russian oil and gas means nothign to Russia.

Oil and gas are used to make fertilizer, fertilizer is needed to create the massive crop yields we expect. Like for wheat, when the norhtern hemisphere harvests in the fall, they have six months of reserves on top of that to cover demand. For corn and soybeans, it is usually just 60 days, And the Sothern hemisphere is harvesting now. brazil and argentina both do soybeans really well, so there is always some production somewhere. We really don't have to worry about 2022 from a production standpoint, but a logistics one. Port of LA pre covid, 90% of ships were on time, now only 10% and there is a backlog. Which means bottle neck. So we can't move food where it needs to be, so that should increase reserves being held. 2023 will be a problem if we can't get enough fertilizer or have a very bad rainy season. But no one in exporting countries should have an issue getting food, other than it will be more expensive. Alternatives will be needed for sure in net importers, and likely in the exporters too, because they will always feed themselves first. And as an example, the USA companies have to get permission to sell large amounts of grain to foreign buyers. So that is a possible action too.

> brazil and argentina both do soybeans really well

Where is Brazil growing that soy? In their vast and ample prairies? (hint: the answer to the second question is 'no')

> So we can't move food where it needs to be, so that should increase reserves being held.

This parallels a problem we have in cluster management - if load increases and you spin up new servers as a response (increasing capacity), then depending on how those servers work they might actually increase load while trying to spool up. You then have to be careful you don't create a feedback loop where spinning up servers triggers spinning up more servers.

If you can't get food into the ports, then stockpiling it means bringing more food in through those same ports. Which makes getting food (and other supplies) slower, which means you increase your stockpiles, which means more shipments having trouble getting into port...

Often the right answer is to raise the low water mark, which means that the status quo is maintained until the next lull, when you hold on to some of your excess capacity instead of letting it go, and to refine your boundary conditions to react a little bit sooner, and/or a little less aggressively (ie, do less but do it sooner).

Brazil soybean production map: https://ipad.fas.usda.gov/rssiws/al/crop_production_maps/Bra... They cut down rainforest for soybeans and cattle. Which McD and burger king buy from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/17/leading-...

> Where is Brazil growing that soy?

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Produ%C3%A7%C3%A3o_de_soja_no_...

> hint: the answer to the second question is 'no'

Of course it's 'no'. It is mostly produced on the savanna and semi-arid areas.

Oil and gas are used to make hydrogen which is used to make fertilizer, but it’s possible to get hydrogen without oil.

> Port of LA pre covid, 90% of ships were on time, now only 10% and there is a backlog.

Where can I find this information?

And we've already been headed in that direction since the supply issues driven by COVID. China just locked down Shenzhen again this weekend.

Russia, like the US/Canada, China, India, Australia and Brazil, maybe some others, have enough natural resources, manufacturing and skills that they could on-shore the great majority of things. Granted, probably none would have a best in class of much, but they could still be pretty independent. China has some mineral dependencies and India, Russia and Brazil might have some semiconductor dependencies, but they could come up with 1990 to 2000s versions of most semiconductors --and that's probably good enough.

Japan, Britain, France, Germany, etc. probably either don't have enough consumer manufacturing or natural resources to survive independently.

I think globalisation as we saw it was the logical evolution of a world largely at peace for 30 years. No cold wars, no world wars (of course plenty of local ones with terrible human suffering). It was almost as if we thought humanity was past that; we were past the trenches of WWI, fascist craziness of WWII and entrenched rivalry of Cold War, and we’re building a stable, global world of tomorrow. Then it does make sense to source everything wherever it is cheapest; services in developed countries, resources in developing ones (for consumers in the former anyway).

Except of course, it turns out that wasn’t right. China is raising the stakes and wants a seat in the superpower club, Russia clearly isn’t past WWII style politics. But I guess 4 years ago this wasn’t obvious to the average politician (who tend to be reactive anyway).

I personally think that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union, not anything to do with trade. We've always had trade for the past few centuries and it never stopped countries from attacking/invading others.

Semiconductors, raw materials for manufacturing, capital, ownership stakes.

Russia is now seeing viable businesses shut down in mass because their owners decide to exit the market. Europe can't sever Russia entirely due to energy dependence. Everyone is wondering what will happen when Russian companies go bankrupt, or the harvests from Ukraine and Russia don't materialize.

Is the real question whether it's safe to have any large economic dependencies on a country that you may have a military conflict with in the future? I'm not sure you can easily segment "core" vs. non-core dependencies except by the fraction of the economy they represent.

Indeed, it is possibly a best case scenario for the US, in the sense that now we are getting an example of what happens when a leader pushes through sanctions and it gives us a sense of just how catastrophic a Chinese invasion of a foreign neighbor would be.

So far, it also shows that the theory that a strongly interconnected economy can prevent war is pretty moot. The EU and the US applied just about every economic sanctions (except imports of oil and gas in the case of EU) and Putin won't stop.

I've not really seen people discussing this, but it seems like one of the biggest 'results' of this invasion as far as long term geopolitics goes. Personally, I'd bought into the idea that heavily intertwined economies tended to prevent war. I'm much less convinced now, inasmuch as it seems fairly clear that autocrats with the power to wage war may yet do so on much more ideological grounds, economics be damned.

Yes, I think the real takeaway is that people are not rational actors and people in positions of massive power even less so.

I think there was an assumption baked into globalism that heads of state would behave in the best interest of their citizens, but that's only even approximately true when the country is a functioning democracy. In an authoritarian state, what's good for the leader may vary wildly from what's good for the people. One could argue that the entire point of autocratic power is for the leader to be able to do what their people don't want.

And once you have someone with that level of power and no obligations to the masses, there should be no expectation that they will be have rationally or in the economic interests of the entire country. As long as it benefits their perverse psychology or isolated offshore bank accounts, it's on the table.

Pretty thin experiment to be making conclusions on though.

There can be lots of scenarios where the last 70 years saw lots more war.

Especially the "people in power are even less rational" part. The 99% might seem more predictable than the 1% only because the law of large numbers smooths out the random, unpredictable irrational acts.

That's a good point. It may simultaneously be true that globalism doesn't prevent irrational war to the degree that we had hoped, but it does still prevent it more than some other economic alternative.

(Personally, I think the best way to prevent war is non-corrupt democracies with little autocratic power concentration and a strong fair press. Most people don't want to go to war and kill others, so when you give the entire populace agency over what the military does, you get a lot less irrational wars.)

> I'd bought into the idea that heavily intertwined economies tended to prevent war

Hardly a novel error, at least: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

I think given the speed of information today people have too high exceptions just how fast something like sanctions would take to work.

it is not a "One Click, Buy now, next day delivery" Amazon Prime type of thing, we have come to expect INSTANT RESULTS, that is just not how Geo Politics works

I also find it amusing when people say Gas price increases are due to Russia... Those are comming for sure, but no there has not been enough time for Russia's action to impact gas prices.. not yet.... But brace for it...

Politicians love to Cease on current events to explain economic results that are actually months or years in the making

Prices change in anticipation of changes to supply and demand, even if those changes have not occurred yet. The stock market will swing down on the announcement of an interest rate hike, even if such a hike hasn't taken place yet. So it's entirely reasonable to attribute price increases to current events (although it is still worth pointing out that it's only a contributing factor, since inflation has been quite high for months).

You forget one critical thing, there is vast difference between stock and Commodity trading which is 100% speculation based vs Physical goods pricing which is not.

The idea that business are adjusting their physical goods sold pricing based on news events is laughable, I know of ZERO businesses that do that.

The price of gasoline seems to follow extremely tightly with the price of crude oil.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2501/crude-oil-vs-gasoline-price...

Yeah I think it takes only one madman at the rudder to grind global trade and diplomacy to a halt.

> So far, it also shows that the theory that a strongly interconnected economy can prevent war is pretty moot.

This sounds a little no true scottsman, but I'm not sure Russia was heavily interconnected. What necessary good(s) do they lose out on when/if the world refuses to export to them? They're fairly self-sufficient, as I understand it, which makes sanctions relatively weak.

> The EU and the US applied just about every economic sanctions (except imports of oil and gas in the case of EU) and Putin won't stop.

To some extent, sanctions work more as a threat than a punishment, but threats only work if they are credible. The goal of these sanctions might not be so much to stop Putin (he clearly won't be stopping in the near term, for a number of political, psychological, and sociological reasons) but to a) damage the Russian economy and reduce their capacity to execute this war in the medium term, b) use that example as an object lesson for other countries who are considering expansionism, and c) lend credibility to future threats of sanctions.

The gas+oil spigot is not completely turned off yet, even by sanctions adherent countries. The real difficulty comes if there's an end run around the sanctions by China and/or India. Imagine an exodus from that market. Imagine Apple having to exit China. And imagine all the services and trade with India. Those are very different spigots than oil and gas. Closing those is going to involve a lot of pain.

Investing in those countries always involved tradeoffs. But the idea any country would help another in a blatantly illegal war of aggression to expand borders - it's so contrary to the U.N. charter and post-WW2 world that it's really quite surprising. China? As a founding member of the U.N. and permanent member of the Security Council helping Russia in any capacity? I am surprised. China may have lost upwards of 15 million in WW2. Have we forgotten everything?

I am surprised by the direction China took here. This is a European war, not a US one, to me they had everything to gain by painting themselves as a supporter of Ukraine (getting preferable treatment from the EU) than as a neutral party.

China being against US interest in general makes perfect sense to me, but against the EU it just does not make as much sense.

> China being against US interest in general makes perfect sense to me, but against the EU it just does not make as much sense.

I'm not sure if EU can be considered as a party able to care about own interest. It's just a group that is more concerned about US than common European interest. If it were an independent factor, we would already have own army and there would be no US occupation^H "support" troops scattered at every strategic point in Europe.

And Europe would have strong rules that would limit the influence of US traditional and social media in Europe, that basically create what Europeans think and want.

So yes, if China wants to be number one, it will focus on harming the current number one, and not his minions, which will sooner or later just change their master when number one changes.

> It's just a group that is more concerned about US than common European interest. If it were an independent factor, we would already have own army and there would be no US occupation^H "support" troops scattered at every strategic point in Europe.

US as Europe's whipping boy knows little bounds. The US has repeatedly asked EU countries to stop funding Putin's war machine and fund their own militaries with something substantial. Most EU countries have continued to poo-poo this, forcing US to spend 4% GDP on defense while Germany has gotten away with 1% while funding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Trump was threatening to remove majority of military funding to Germany and they were aghast, "how dare the US not spend their $ to protect us." Of course people like you still somehow make US patronage of your defense into an "occupation." We'd be ecstatic if you actually funded your own instead of making us just to keep international order.

If spending money on military and "defending" Europe doesn't serve American interests, why not just leave Europe and let us defend ourselves? Your army stays to make sure it protects your interest, not ours.

If you think USA is doing us a favour, just leave Europe, and Middle East, and Africa, and Asia. Just go back to your continent and let us deal with Putin and other challenges best we can. We don't need neither your "protection" nor your "protection fee".

Maybe without US warmongering, we would not need to be afraid of Russia. German technology and Russian resources is something that USA might be scared to death to end its world domination.

China is against the West (or anyone else) intruding on other nations issues (specially China's and its neighbours)... so, it's not suprising they won't wish to take sides on a fairly regional fight they have very little historical or economical interest in. Other distant, large but non-aligned countries like India and Brazil seem to have taken similar positions - not taking sides, just hoping for peace.

The interested parties in this war are NATO countries and Russia, besides Ukraine, because the war is a consequence of decades of hostilities regarding the re-alignment of the ex-USSR territories East of Poland towards the West and against Russia.

Members of the Security Council are obligated to intrude. That is the agreement they are a party to. If China cannot perform that duty, they need to withdraw as a permanent member of the Security Council.

Russia has announced they have the right to expand their borders using aggression. They have committe the supreme international crime, as judged at Nuremberg. If countries aren't subscribing to that world view anymore, then we are lost. We are doomed to have a world war three. The entire fucking point of these institutions is to prevent another one. If nothing else China should be an institutionalist, preserving the international system of laws for its own long term interest.

Maybe it's lost on people, but Poland told NATO in 1993 that if they weren't allowed to join, they were going to build their own nukes. Because they didn't trust Russia. They weren't the only one.

If the U.N. Charter system dissolves, the NPT falls soon after that. And then it's an arms race.

I take the opposite lesson - for the next generation, no one will think about invading a neighbor without remembering how devastating the sanctions were to Russia.

How devastating were they really? The west is cutting off Russia, but China will be a good enough market for Russian resources for the next decade. Sure Russia will be poorer as a result, but their invasion of Ukraine is about as bad as it can gets (no believable motive, lots of sympathy for Ukraine, very publicised destruction in videos and pictures from Russia) so they got the worst possible sanctions we could impose and yet Russia is still bombing Kyiv, they didn't sue for peace in exchange of lesser sanctions.

China as a monopsony buyer of Russian gas will be able to set the price, even one that does not recoup the capital costs.

Even before the invasion, the Power of Siberia had been viewed as extremely unprofitable (it seems likely that corruption played a major role in driving up costs), and then there's the further issue that more work is necessary for it to send its total capacity, which is a fraction of what it sends to Europe.

> Yet the project does not appear to be as grand a success as Moscow would have liked it to be. To begin with, the capacity of gas production on the Russian side of the border is open to doubt. The Chayanda gas field in Yakutia region, currently the only source of gas for the pipeline, can produce up to 25 bcm a year.

> To deliver 38 bcm to China, Gazprom has to develop another large field, Kovykta in the Irkutsk region some 800km south of Chayanda, and connect it to the Power of Siberia with another pipeline, which has not been built yet. The completion of the infrastructure needed for pumping the required volume to China is probably going to take more than 10 years, according to Gazprom’s pre-feasibility study of the project.

> ...

> Currently Gazprom sends westwards about 200 bcm annually via a number of pipeline routes. The Power of Siberia project, however, has a limit of 38 bcm and it is unlikely that another major pipeline project would be launched any time soon. Thus, the Russian company would not be able to switch export flows as it pleases.

> China as a monopsony buyer of Russian gas will be able to set the price

Is it just China? EU also will continue buying gas, and prices are much higher now than year ago.

EU will continue for now, but there's a significant push to move away from Russian gas in many European countries in the next year or two. And if Russia takes over all of Ukraine, I expect sanctions to target energy as well. If they target oil, Putin has threatened to shut off European access to gas - we will see if that's a bluff or not.

> EU will continue for now, but there's a significant push to move away from Russian gas in many European countries in the next year or two.

the question is if those countries will have strong commitment to invest into significant and non-trivial infrastructure rebuild, or it will be just speeches from politicians.

> Russia takes over all of Ukraine

I don't think this was ever goal of Russia. I think they wanted to occupy some southern and eastern regions, force Ukraine to recognize Russian Crimea and set some puppet government in Kyiv.

I believe Ukraine and Russia will reach some agreement soon, Ukraine will likely lose some territory and political independence, and in 3 years Europeans will mostly forget about this stuff, will be destructed by other issues and continue buying Russian oil and gas.

> and set some puppet government in Kyiv

That's what I meant by taking over all of Ukraine. If Russia sets up a puppet government, then I expect further sanctions. Maybe they won't if a settlement is reached with the current government.

> How devastating were they really?

Well, we don't know, and won't for years perhaps, I should've clarified that I'm guessing about what will happen in the long-term, not asserting that Putin will say, "Oh gosh, look at the stock market, I'd better withdraw" in the next few days. But it does seem like the sanctions will have the effect of impoverishing and weakening Russia for decades.

Perhaps in a further destabilized future, Russia could emerge stronger and more independent. Russia may be forced to become more self reliant.

It’s still to early to see all the effects of the sanctions. That was something repeated several times.

I think there is a huge opportunity to use Seaweed or Algae for fertilizer.

Theres ways to do this on each coast but also to utilize the Pig and Cow farming waste to not only clean water in the process but to take major waste producing industries and try to soften their impact.

I think the more people that know about the use cases of Seaweed and Algae will help that industry come back. There were too many companies that only saw Algae as a way to make bio fuel. I see it as a way to clean dirty water, and to produce a bi-product that can go back into the ground.

I also think theres a way we can just use the warmer waters and the over production of seaweed, like the gulf coast especially closer to Mexico. So much seaweed is scrapped from the beaches but never used at scale for production

For some small freshwater lakes, they participate in "weed harvesting" to keep waterways navigable and reduce "nutrient load" to the lake which can trigger algae blooms. The "weeds" are various forms of aquatic plants (e.g. Eurasian watermilfoil) which get removed and often transported to local farms for use as fertilizer. This isn't a very widespread practice, but has been included in education from state-level DNRs.

We could create fertilizer from sewage. I didn't see a lot of details in that article as to what they were going to use to create said fertilizer - only that there was a 'sustainable' bullet there. Sustainable implies not using fossil fuels, I would think.

It depends on what is used to clean the sewage, but I think theres a couple ways to make fertilizer from it. Depending on the animal or type of sewage, if you use duckweed or algae to clean the water you can take that and apply it to fields. You will also have the sludge from the sewage that can also be applied directly to fields. Pig farmers will usually take some of the sludge from their lagoons and apply it directly to their fields, and they will also spray a watery-sewage on the fields. I don't like this method since its proven to travel by air and also can contaminate water tables at high levels

But if the water is high in metals and other toxins you can only do so much with the excess from this process

Can salt-water-grown seaweed be used as fertilizer? I'd suspect that it would require significant amounts of fresh water processing to remove the salts or else it could hurt the plants.

I found a local business that was turning seaweed into fertilizer and he was letting the seaweed dry out and then grinds it up and bags and sells it. I'm not sure if the drying of the seaweed will get rid of the high sodium, but that was my first thought is the amount of work that will have to go into cleaning it.

There also can be other fish, and debris that can get stuck in large patches of seaweed. So that would have to be filtered out as well

I've read rotting fish can be great for gardens... maybe the quantity of fertilizer needed is low enough that salinity isn't a major issue.

I have seen people set up clear tubes w/ water as "algae generators" to create diesel, and also to create fertilizer for their gardens

I don't think there is enough to scale that way. I'm also not sure if there are ecosysytem concerns from taking it from the sea and moving it to the midwest. I have no idea how seaweed will affect soil long term. That said, within the limits of the above by all means use it. Just don't pretend it is an answer along.

Seaweed is already a fertilizer and used around the globe. It's no different then decomposed lettuce or any other leaf vegetation, it just grows underwater.

Yeah honestly I think there would be too much processing involved to make it realistic.

The benefits of Seaweed to soil (ignoring salt and sand) has been proven to help bring key nutrients and metals to the soil that are missing from farm land that was used for single plant production.

It will be easier to just add those elements directly as chemicals.

Depends on the element that needs to be added, seaweed has the benefit of being a weed that can grow in the right conditions very fast.

And seaweed will have the drawback of being an extremely dilute source of trace elements. Consider iodine. Seaweed is rich in iodine, which means the concentration of the element can be as high as tens of ppm by mass. Which is cheaper, applying 1 kilogram of iodine (cost about $30) to a field, mixed in with regular fertilizer, or transporting and applying tens of tonnes of seaweed?

I believe the RU war opens a new door to a lot of grief and opportunities. My company has X teams in Ukraine and Y teams in Belarus and we had to evacuate all teams in the recent weeks. Those teams take care of most of the IT-Ops and Big data infrastructures and the invasion impacted us greatly.

All in all, I see immediate impact to the IT world is that Former-USSR countries will quickly lose the IT premium. During the last decade a lot of IT Operation business was out-sourced to Ukraine, Belarus as well as Romania (while not a former USSR republic, it is in the neighborhood of Ukraine). With geopolitics events fold out, all such business is going to flow to other part of the world.

In the long run, the world is probably going to be more fractured. Not to say globalization is going to end, but it's going to pause for a while. Geopolitics events can and will impact commodity prices and trigger weird shits on the future market. We are also going to say more chaos in countries which produce a lot of commodities but have a weaker economy as everyone needs more commodity under their belt.

It also impacts whoever is in the middle of two major players. Poland for example has long been a major production base in EU. However, if Russia is able to swallow Ukraine in whole, theoretically the whole Poland is not going to be safe (enough). I wonder what could be the consequences of such geopolitical events.

Romania is a NATO member, and an EU member.

Outsource IT to Finland. Microsoft already bought Nokia so it's US-strategic. Also Finns are highly educated. Obviously less cheap than poorer ex-Soviet countries though.

It's hard to imagine a world in which Poland will be vulnerable to Russian aggression, but Finland will be left alone.

Username checks out.

> Belorussia

It's Belarus!

My bad! Can I blame it on auto-correct? I guess no :S

A quibble:

"Sustainable – reduces the greenhouse gas impact of transportation, production, and use through renewable energy sources, feedstocks, formulations, and incentivizing greater precision in fertilizer use;"

That's not what sustainable means - I feel like we're watering down this term until it is becoming meaningless. "Sustainable" literally means that you can sustain the practice indefinitely, and any process based on fossil fuels or any other resource that can be depleted automatically fails that test. No process that doesn't use 100% renewable energy and 100% renewable material inputs is sustainable, by definition.

And also, by definition, any process that is not sustainable will not be sustained in the long term, because that's what the word means.

It's fine to use "reduced environmental impact" or something like that, but let's not use "sustainable" unless we really, actually mean sustainable.

Once it became a target, the precision of the term was at risk. Especially if you consider that the ability to redefine "what it means to be sustainable" is a means to greenlight high-value projects or grease the skids on large purchases of materials or services. You've correctly pointed out that use of the term "sustainable" is not sustainable.

> "Sustainable" literally means that you can sustain the practice indefinitely, and any process based on fossil fuels or any other resource that can be depleted automatically fails that test.

This is a definition of sustainable by which nothing in the universe is sustainable.

"Sustainable" will be used the way the words "racism" and "diversity" are used now; they will be used to push whatever is profitable for the elites.

Translation: The USDA plans to increase subsidies for farmers.

Not that I'm necessarily against such a thing. Food price stability is very important, and farm subsidies are an important way that we ensure it in the USA.

Well yes, but in a particular way that increases production of fertilizer locally, which not all subsidies for farmers do.

Farmers, in turn, vote for "Small Government" because they don't like people living off welfare. smh

I don't like the line of thinking here. You're saying farmers are the same as those receiving welfare, its not fair to either group. Farmers receive subsidies for the greater good especially of those eating the products of their work.

It's the cognitive dissonance of a certain party that equates socialism with evil when it's distributed fairly but a necessity when influential special interests receive a benefit.

A question I have idly wondered - how much space does it take to feed a country? If you had to feed 100M people with a nutritionally complete diet forever, how small of an area could you manage to generate the food? Using current or near-term feasible (<5 years away) and leaving ethics off the table (Soylent Green, etc)? How many months/years could you stockpile?

> If you had to feed 100M people with a nutritionally complete diet forever, how small of an area could you manage to generate the food?

I don't know the answer for centralized food production, but for local food production based on what I know about self-sufficiency and homesteading, my back of the napkin math goes like this:

Minimum food production area for family of 4 (2 adults, 2 kids) based on diet:

1/2 acre for vegetables/chickens

2-3 acres for dairy products

5 acres for grains/nuts

10 acres for meat

Plus 2-3 acres timber for heating

That's ~ 20 acres per family, working all day, almost every day to produce food and heat.

That is still assuming you would be able to use modern technology (tractors/implements etc.) instead of manual labor and do this in a moderate hardiness zone, probably 5-9. There is a reason in the 1800s homestead land grants were up to 160 acres.

From a US perspective: The US has roughly 900 million acres of farm land. If everyone would homestead (unrealistic), and every family would be relocated to a productive area (unrealistic), this land could support 45 million homesteads.

> and leaving ethics off the table (Soylent Green, etc)?

I expect this to be an unrealistic scenario as well. IMHO people will start roaming for food and stealing from those who produce it, instead of patiently waiting for their government handout of whatever astronaut food was stored.

Accounting for meat and dairy is probably an order of magnitude higher quality of life than I was imagining. I was thinking more a diet of beans, starchy potatoes, and mealworms for protein.

It would probably be easier in practice to involve animals and take advantage of all the land you can. Not everywhere that is currently pasture can even support agriculture that well. Maybe its too rocky to drag a plow or too steep for farm equipment. Maybe the soil and irrigation situation doesn't support much else than whatever bits of greenery are eaten by the grazers. Being able to pasture on these lands suddenly means you can actually extract usable nutrients from them.

It is amazing that one of the outcomes of the Russian-Ukraine war is helping de-globalize. I for one welcome more north american (canada, united states and mexico) manufacturing even if it costs more. We need to look at the supply chain stability as a national security effort.

It isn't obvious that deglobalizing is good for national security.

The imposition of sanctions is allowing NATO to counter Russia without firing a shot. A world in which we're able to work out our problems without shooting at one another may be a good one.

Retaining the capacity to decouple is important, but nurturing some level of interdependence may help us to find a way to work together. If we have nothing to lose by going to war, we'll have more wars.

That was one of the arguments for globalization. But what we see is there are only a few big actors, who will remain big actors for centuries if not forever due to their size and nuclear capabilities. One of the three biggest actors showed they are willing to destroy everything despite sanctions, and no doubt will permanently change their supply chain to avoid too much pain in the future. So the ship has sailed, likely forever.

Just like in the corporate world, modern power consolidates. For smaller countries "soft power" from globalization can work because the relationships are extremely lopsided, and likely will well into the future - based on how the pie of vassal or semi-vassal states is divided in the next couple decades.

The extreme end of de-globalization is that nation-states actually have a greater incentive to go to war in order to secure more resources and industrial/economic capacity (including humans!) for themselves, meaning a new age of overt colonialism and zero-sum international relations.

There is definitely a balance to be found here.

It gives some teeth as a counter punch, but it’s not “working out our differences” in the slightest.

What will come from this is a push for Russia and China to be completely self-dependent. Regardless of upcoming trade, the consequences are loud and clear.

I’m also entirely skeptical that this would work in the slightest with China.

It's also good for the environment. Globalization has allowed an environmental race to the bottom while simultaneously creating an illusion of environmental progress in the developed world. We've just sent all the polluting industries elsewhere.

It also helped billions get out of poverty.

Everyone needs to start composting

s/Everyone/municipalities/

An individual mandate (esp. an unfunded mandate) to resolve systemic issues is definitely an anti-pattern.

I'm a bit tired of this argument. We're all buying the wrong stuff, our mass is part of the system. I'm not judging consumers, I'm just saying everybody living differently will change the system. Wouldn't word of mouth, follower effect kick a stronger longer response to the top-down policies ?

The neoliberal response

Great ideology, im not sure why so many fear it?

>fear

Criticism of something is not necessarily an expression of fear. This reaction primarily serves to make critics feel ashamed for speaking out against something, as in "oh you're just afraid of my-good-idea-X"

Because it favors aesthetic nonsense over real action

Agreed. I wish there was a tax credit for farmers who don’t use fertilizer, even if that’s only imported, so as to encourage composting. Right now it’s pretty easy to externalize agricultural waste on the public’s dime or health. I’m thinking about the hog waste lagoons in NC for example. What if some portion of that vast expanse of pig shit could be reused?

Mostly it is reused. However shipping is expensive and you can apply too much and cause problems. there is way too much manure in some places, and not enough in others.

It isn't exactly safe either. There is a lot of diseases in that manure. You need to take more care when applying it than some fertilizers. (though not nearly as much as anhydrous ammonia)

Sewage treatment plants need to start creating fertilizer. Example: https://www.cleanwatergrow.com/

Alot of us already are, i use my leafdrops and all vegetable trash to grow my garden most of the summer and fall we dont need to buy any, but it takes alot of work..

This reminds me of Mao's efforts to get people to smelt steel in their backyards. It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly for political signaling purposes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace

I'm not sure if the grandparent was thinking of this, but I have lived places where the city collected compost on the same days as the trash and recycling - there was just an extra bin that you could throw food scraps and yard waste and whatnot into, and then the city managed it from there.

I think they also let you come get some soil back for your garden or whatnot if you wanted to.

It seemed like a good way to handle things.

According to the EU report [page 15], food waste collection in the EU varies between 0% and 47% of total food waste, depending on the country. The average is 16%.

https://zerowasteeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2020_0...

Except composting doesn't involve destroying useful resources and creates a product that actually works quite well.

While you can’t make industrial quality steel in your backyard, most households could make food that is better than “industrial” quality produce in their backyard.

I live in an area where most people garden - including my wife and both of our sets of parents.

The produce is undeniably better, but it’s still not an efficient use of most professional’s time. If you’re particularly poor or retired then it absolutely does.

Fruit trees are more expensive in the beginning, but they need less overall time put in to them for what you get out. They’d be a good choice for most people with a yard.

Permaculture techniques like no-dig cultivation, perennial plants, and frequent mulching can reduce the amount of labor needed to yield valuable and nutritionally dense produce greatly.

Everyone with a yard with trees that need occasional pruning and a 4'x4' space for a compost pile can buy a ~$120 electric chipper and make their own composted mulch and replace the majority of soil amendments the home gardener uses.

It takes a lot of labor even just to maintain my few plants and keep up with pests/drought/storms/nutrient deficiencies. The pests are such an issue. Anytime you grow anything in quantity, you are entering this unbalanced thermodynamic state and the environment will respond by creating an equilibrium. In other words more pests find more food and more of their offspring survive and there are more pests overall.

The farmer has historically and even today solved this with scale. Suppose they manage to kill 95% of the pests and the remaining continue to eat out the crop all season, which is fine because there is enough crop where some loss from pests are tolerated. Meanwhile in my case and in the personal garden scale, one pest can ruin your entire crop. I've had one rat come over and eat all my produce in two nights. Then after that they marched right next door to my neighbor's garden and ate most of their produce.

Gardening is a fun and rewarding hobby, but make no mistake that it takes a ton of labor, and you are going to have a hard time turning a backyard garden or a community garden plot into a reliable enough food source to actually consistently feed yourself. Starving to death is not so uncommon even among the old fronteirspeople who knew a thing or two about what they were doing about homesteading.

> It was a plainly inefficient and pointless use of labor and resources, mostly for political signaling purposes

Or. Maybe china was facing the threat of nuclear attack from both the soviet union and the united states, who both had absolute aerial superiority over china, and rather than building massive centers of steel production which could be destroyed with a single bomb, they distributed/decentralized it amongst their immense country and population? It's the simple idea of not having all your eggs in one basket. It's better to have 1,000,000 small producers of steel than 1 major producer of steel when you are facing nuclear armed adversaries. It's also why china didn't start to urbanize until after they produced enough nukes and icbms to guarantee their own safety. Just like Bush didn't want to waste a $5 million missile to take out a $5 tent in afghanistan, nukes are pretty much useless against an un-urbanized nation. There were studies done by the US government on nuclear war vs soviet union and china. All the studies showed that even though china had a much larger population, our nuclear attack on the soviet union would be far more devastating because the soviet union was urbanized whiles china was decentralized and rural.

It's so funny how these people who were doing such inefficient and pointless activities set the foundation for china to eventually usurp the united states. We've been told how incompetent and backwards "the ccp" are and yet we are told that they are our top threat? Which is it?

So much of what's written about china turns out to be nonsense propaganda when you just take a closer look. Could it be that mao and the communists were smarter than people who write wikipedia articles or just read them passively without giving it any thought?

> and rather than building massive centers of steel production which could be destroyed with a single bomb, they distributed/decentralized it amongst their immense country and population

Fun idea, except it (predictably) didn't work at all, because producing steel isn't economically feasible without massive economies of scale.

> Fun idea

It happens when you try to make sense of a crazy senseless world sometimes.

> except it (predictably) didn't work at all

Some would say it worked precisely as expected.

> because producing steel isn't economically feasible without massive economies of scale.

When you are faced with nuclear annihilation, you don't worry about economic feasibility but economic necessity. You do what needs be done. That's why war is terrible economic policy. Everyone is doing the economically infeasible.

China wouldn't be where it is now if it didn't work. Maybe in the most populous country, they were able to produce one or two people who knew what they were doing? Just a thought. You are probably right though. Those bumbling chinese accidentally stumbled upon the largest economy in the world. Sometimes you get stupid lucky.

Are you wumao or something? This post is hilarious

and add chickens + vermicomposting too!

That being said, I think organic waste separation of trash is a better idea than everyone composting (from a pest, disease, and efficiency of economy perspective)

Why waste fuel moving organic waste to a central location when you can have it "processed" and used locally?

Because it's more likely to actually happen that way.

I've tried composting, and don't have the patience for it. Lots of folks live in apartments or places with HOAs that forbid it.

There's also the benefit that industrial composting can process things like dairy and meat safely that can't be home-composted.

If you don't have patience to dump organic waste in a one spot outside of your house, how do you plan on doing the same with the waste bin provided by your city? Yes, I understand that this will not be possible everywhere, but let's just start doing this where possible, before we look for expensive and complex solutions to simple problems.

This is a ridiculous view of composting. Even if you assume everyone's organic waste is appropriate for a no-worm no-turn pile (hint: it isn't), it still won't work in the winter in most of the world, lots of people simply don't have the space, and everything will be fucked up the first time a raccoon finds your pile.

Doesn't a heap need tending to in some way?

I'm happy to put my food waste in a little box and have the government come round with a truck once per week, at the very least its rotting somewhere miles away from me.

I don't think i have the space or knowledge to do it myself

I'm not sure where you are located, but in Philadelphia there is a service, you sign up and they give you a bucket to put out for collection once a week. https://www.bennettcompost.com/weekly-composting

I'm in the UK.

No signing up here, you just put the correct boxes out on the correct day and some chap picks it up.

Its slightly frustrating having six different bins and having to keep a schedule pinned to the fridge but it kinda works.

Honestly I just bury compostables and let the natural processes happen. This takes very little work. Not so easy to do in an apartment though.

That doesn't work well and it creates a lot of excess methane.

See: How current landfills work

It’s in a few inches of soil. I assume soil organisms, insects, and earthworms will take care of it.

Our city collects organic matter to compost. I have a garden and I don't compost myself because 1) I wouldn't want to compost things that would attract animals, and 2) composting takes up space, and takes forever.

It's really not that hard to fill up the compost bin and then put it out with the trash and recycling every week. Municipal composting is great IMO.

I would never trust compost from a municipal source. Too much chance for random toxic waste to get introduced by unscrupulous dumpers.

What I'd like is an automatic waste sorter. Throw everything into one bin, put sort the glass one way, paper another, all X plastics in their places, metals, compostables...

We have made progress in that for recycling, but there are two trucks that come by my house.

> Throw everything into one bin, put sort the glass one way, paper another, all X plastics in their places, metals, compostables...

Cardboard, at the very least, would generally be immediately ruined and rendered non-recylcable doing this.

Cardboard itself is only barely recyclable in the first place. My understanding of the recycling process for paper is that basically you're required to go a grade down in the process, and cardboard itself is basically the end of that process.

I suspect you'd environmentally gain more from improved recovery of more useful materials from single-stream waste than you'd lose from no longer recycling cardboard products. (Especially since a large amount of dedicated cardboard recycling is itself going to be spoiled by the inclusion of greasy pizza boxes in that stream).

Corrugated cardboard recycling is pretty big because of the volume of material used in manufacturing and commerce.

There are facilities that sort the entire stream, partly because diverting material away from the landfill saves cost there.

More cost-effective to do it at a centrally processed location + you can capture methane and utilize it either as renewable natural gas or process it into fuel cell grade hydrogen. As well more people opt-in since not everyone has to learn how to properly compost all they need to do is source-separate.

I'm not sure how it is more effective to drive horribly ineffective diesel trucks to gather that waste and to dump it somewhere else, build a thousands of facilities to process this and utilize the methane safely instead of simply having a compost pile behind your house (where possible).

That's easy to solve - use Hydrogen trucks or EV trucks for the heavy duty load. Not yet in the commercial market - coming in quickly.

How is that easy if there are currently on H-powered garbage trucks on the market and it will take billions of dollars to replace all of them?

It costs billions of dollars to replace the fleet anyways so its already a sunk cost - instead of replacing with diesel your replacing with H2 or EV at the end of their life. You are just substituting out one product for another - that is relatively easy.

Yeah but it will take years for this to happen, and just replacing the trucks is only part of the cost - you still need to build new infrastructure to either charge with electricity or fuel with hydrogen. But wait! There is more - you need to pay millions to get rid of all the old infrastructure like gas stations that cities have, with old fuel tanks, distributors etc. In the current economic climate, I don't see how most of the cities could afford to do all of this.

If you take it as a one off maybe it is more difficult to make the finances add up. However given the groundswell of change happening right now, political willpower to change, private funding, corporate support and public support these changes look to be inevitable. I think you need a bit more of a can do attitude than a meh looks impossible to me why bother mindset.

In the case of hydrogen - it isn't that difficult. You develop on site hydrogen production capabilities and replace the fleet returning to site to re-fuel. Self contained.

Getting rid of the old infrastructure - good local jobs to do that, and upgrade it with something new. Come on now, that was too easy.

What bothers me is that people like to be "eco" if it involves cool new tech, but they never consider a simple facts like the one that in most cases, it's more eco-friendly to use whatever you have until it can no longer be repaired than to buy something that's just few percent efficient. We're being wasteful but we make ourselves happy by packaging it all in "save the planet" box.

> Why waste fuel moving organic waste to a central location

The point of this whole post is Fertilizer. You eventually have to collect the distributed waste (or compost fertilizer) to a a centralized place. Caveated that the resulting mass could be decreased, but also lose the opportunity to make compost tea, feeding any edible mass to animals, or vermicomposting to get even richer output.

Also lets not discount the distributed cost to teach millions of people how to properly blend (mix grass with food waste etc), turn (else you can either cause fires or create methane), harvest (when's it done), and then redistribute the output.

Yes we could all become home gardeners, but then expect to see our GDP to decline as Software engineers, Lawyers, architects et al. star doing "farm work" and labor.

You really don't need much time to become a home gardener, and believe me that spending time outside digging in the dirt is a very health way to spend time away from the computer.

You can get free compost in my county. They take all of those tall brown paper bags that are used for yard waste and compost them. Where i live now it’s a private company moving the recycle stuff but where I lived before the county picked them up with a suction machine. You could put leaves and grass clippings at the curb and they would suck it up every Monday.

It’s expensive to setup your own hot compost process. It’s both complicated and requires a volume of material most don’t have. Composting should be done at scale really

because compost piles attract rats, mice, and other undesirables.

You can go to Central Park and see rats everywhere, and I don't see any compost piles there.

Actual action: "USDA will launch a public inquiry seeking information regarding seeds and agricultural inputs, fertilizer, and retail markets."

So this is a long way from increasing domestic production.

Glad to see they're doing this but I feel like it will be years before a US fertilizer supply chain can ramp up.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

Usually best to wait till the fall, they’ll come up lovely come spring.

The US actually makes a lot of fertilizer and those companies are looking to expand. (the big ones also own oil refineries so they have plenty of money to invest right now)

So we shouldn’t try at all?

Same botched logic that says we shouldn’t invest in light rail / subways.

The incumbent advantage never favors progress.

Brilliant insight.

What's the TL;DR on fertilizer market? Is it a function of lack of access to Potash deposits in the US vs demand?

There's a few different reason:

* Ukraine and Russia are collectively the world's largest producer of potash

* Nitrogen fertilisers use natural gas in their production, which has skyrocketed in price

* China has banned or heavily restricted the export of fertiliser and fertiliser components over local supply fears

Put that together with the effective removal of the world's largest exporter of wheat (Russia) and the 5th largest exporter of wheat (Ukraine) from world supply, and food prices are gonna get nasty. Moreso in countries that tend to import Russian/Ukrainian wheat e.g. Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh

PotashCorp here in Canada was pretty big not sure if it still is. A large part of global supply of potash came from the province of Saskatchewan.

Still is, Canada produces about 12 million tonnes of potash a year. Ukraine and Russia each produce about 7 million tonnes.

So that market balance is out of whack. Probably why Nutrien is skyrocket stock wise (Potashcorp + Agrium merger)

Nitrogen is extracted from air (which is 78% nitrogen), and combined with hydrogen to create ammonia. Doing this is doable with renewable energy, but it is significantly more expensive still vs using hydrogen from natural gas. As cost of natural gas has gone up (due to Russia not exporting as much), price of ammonia has followed.

My understanding is that there are three popular types of fertilizer and all three require materials (phosphate, nitrogen, potash) that currently in a shortage.

Much of the potash of the world is in Belarus and Russia. Nitrogen fertilizer requires liquid natural gas, of which the price is surging. Phosphate based fertilizers are currently under export ban by China.

Modern fertilizers are made with petroleum derived chemicals.

That doesn't sound right, what plants need - primarily nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium - is not contained in petroleum. Methane from natural gas is however used as a source of hydrogen to fixate nitrogen from the air in the form of ammonia.

Sulphur and Ammonia are made from oil and natural gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production#Modern_ammo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur#Production

As someone with a medium to large scale farm, the fertilizer price rises have been pretty severe. Already up about 40% over last year. It's really a confluence of factors. Natural gas is required to produce ammonia (it's about 80% of the cost), and usually the the prices of both move together, but this has outpaced those global fuel increases. Supply chain disruptions, increased demand, new tariffs on urea, higher fuel costs have all contributed.

Fertilizer accounts for about 35% of the input costs for my farm (corn and beans) and 25% for other crops so price changes have a pretty significant impact. There's pros and cons, price increases means less fertilizer applied and lower yields, but also less environmental impact and runoff/leaching.

> Fertilizer accounts for about 35% of the input costs for my farm (corn and beans)

Would now be a good time to rethink how we as a country grow corn for everything? Why are we putting so much energy into corn so we can burn it in our gas tanks?

Fuel ethanol is significant but not the largest use of corn. Livestock feed is the largest use of corn, which connects into the larger conversation about food and sustainability. About 45-50% of all US corn crop and 70% of soybeans is used for animal feed. Almost all of my crop goes to those uses eventually.

Here's some info about how the market breaks down if you are curious https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgra...

Without federally subsidized HFCS added to 80% of supermarket products the average American's BMI might drop dangerously below 30, devastating the large sectors of our economy based around mitigating the effects of obesity!

> Natural gas is required to produce ammonia

If I were a chemist, this would be a problem I would set out to solve: an inexpensive means to produce ammonia without natural gas.

The history of (industrial) chemistry is almost nothing but new, inexpensive processes to produce a once-expensive compound. (I don't doubt of course that the natural gas process for creating ammonia was, at one time, such a breakthrough.)

The Birkeland–Eyde process (making fertilizer from hydro power) is actually older than Bosch-Haber (from fossil fuels), but the latter was cheaper.

That is super inefficient, and while it was an industry based on hydropower using the Birkeland-Eyde process before 1910, those factories switched to Haber-Bosch using hydrogen made with electrolysis and electricity from hydropower instead from 1927.

Ultimately this will mean hydrogen from electrolysis. In some places (including Europe, China, and the Middle East(!)) this is already cheaper than hydrogen from natural gas.

Or even a way to make it more efficient.

I have relatives in the business. They are buying out a lot of ammonia plants around the country that were build post WWII with Nazi technology, and then never upgraded. Just by modernizing those plants they are able to save a lot of money in the processing. Stagnation has been a real problem even though the chemists knew how to do better for years.

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